The ‘Flu Shot Cheerleader’ is back — with a warning about the anti-vaccine movement

NBC News article. I couldn't see this referenced previously on S4ME. As they say: "there's a lot to unpack". I wasn't aware of this story until its recent revisit, but I expect some of our American members will remember it well from the late-oughts.

In summary:

Desiree, a young, fit person has flu vaccine and quickly develops a severe movement disorder, characterised as dystonia, also affecting her voice.

Viewing audience horrified, anti-vaccination campaigners such as Jenny McCarthy pick up the story and run with it heavily, causing a reduction in community vaccination at the time of the swine flu outbreak.

In the context of being a young woman, she is disbelieved by many who say she is faking it.

Without examining the patient, simply looking at the video, neurologists diagnose her with psychogenic movement disorder - later FND.

Desperate for help that is not forthcoming from conventional medicine, she is seen by the usual parade of charlatans, one of whom literally says: "only I can help you."

She improves - significantly though not completely. A follow-up sting/gotcha interview paints her as a fraud and faker.

Subsequently she has a degree in molecular biology and wants to work with vaccines. She is uncertain whether the vaccine caused her illness - infection or something else. She has distanced herself from the anti-vaccination movement that took advantage of her.

 

The article contains a video. One aspect that came through clearly to me was her intellectual curiosity from the outset. She was perfectly happy to demonstrate how she could overcome the symptoms: by walking backwards or running, her movements and voice normalised.

That is not the action of someone trying to fake an illness, that is the action of someone trying to help medicine and science understand the disorder, to help her and others. Given subsequent biomedical insights (eg 1, 2) I think it's quite likely she had an immune-driven reaction that affected specific parts of the basal ganglia or cerebellum, which pushed the default pathways into dysfunction, but for her alternative pathways could be recruited that were not so affected (in this specific case by walking backwards, running).

At the time the neurologist (reviewing the video only) stated categorically that it is impossible for a vaccine to cause this sort of movement disorder or voice / accent changes. See this YouTube video.

In the CDC report: "The admitting neurologist felt there was a strong psychogenic component."

Just on the accent aspect, here are some recent references on the neurology and neuropathology of "foreign accent syndrome" —

• A systematic review on production and comprehension of linguistic prosody in people with acquired language and communication disorders resulting from unilateral brain lesions (2023, Journal of Communication Disorders)
• Contribution of the Cerebellum and the Basal Ganglia to Language Production: Speech, Word Fluency, and Sentence Construction—Evidence from Pathology (2020, The Cerebellum)
• Speech in the foreign accent syndrome: differential diagnosis between organic and functional cases (2020, Dementia & Neuropsychologia)
• “Accent issue”: foreign accent syndrome following ischemic stroke (2019, Neurological Sciences)
• Neurological Aspects of Foreign Accent Syndrome in Stroke Patients (2019, Journal of Communication Disorders)

 

The Irish Light: Woman abused by paper which falsely said vaccine killed her son

A grieving mother and her lawyer have been targeted by an extreme campaign of abuse after suing a conspiracy theory newspaper which falsely claimed her son died from a Covid vaccine.

The Irish Light repeatedly abused Edel Campbell online and its supporters have threatened her lawyer with "execution".

Conspiracy theorists worldwide have used dozens of tragic deaths to spread vaccine misinformation.

This case is thought to be the first where a relative has sued.

The Irish Light included Ms Campbell's son, Diego Gilsenan, and 41 others in an article last year which suggested the "untested and dangerous" Covid vaccine was to blame for the deaths. In fact, the BBC has been told Diego had taken his own life in August 2021, aged 18, and had not been vaccinated.

The campaign of abuse following her legal case has been "nothing short of shocking" and may explain why other relatives have not taken action, Ms Campbell's solicitor, Ciaran Mulholland, told BBC Radio 4's Marianna in Conspiracyland podcast.

"You can understand why a lot of people were incredibly reluctant to go to a solicitor when they saw the backlash with Edel Campbell," he said.

Ms Campbell told the BBC that the Irish Light has "made my life hell" and said she's now fearful of speaking out.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66424582

 

The fact that this keeps happening when it's explicitly forbidden in medical codes of conduct to not only diagnose at a distance, but without doing a proper consult, really should make them think a lot harder about how messed up it is that they keep doing things they're not supposed to be doing when it comes to psychosomatic medicine. They have to, otherwise they got nothing.

They just exempt us from those rules. Not them, us. When the rules are supposed to protect us. Twisted.

And that, too:

This is not a valid determination for a diagnosis and every single doctor knows this. They're just feelings. Feelings are not evidence for a medical diagnosis of any kind. Which makes it clear that deep down they don't think any of this is genuine, simply a way to fob off patients when they themselves are failing at it.